Hi All,
Been searching the forums and only found 1 reference to it with no answer given.
I'm trying to apply a SYSEVENT_ENTERED_AREA on an item control script so that when players walk within range of a camp fire it triggers something.
At the moment from what i can see its doing the while loop and waiting for an even but at the end of the wait there is no event received even though a player has walked within the range defined.

Is there a specific reason why SYSEVENT_ENTERED_AREA doesn't appear to work on items or am i doing something wrong?

I guess there could be just as many NPC's in an area, but i understand that there might be limitations.
I just wanted to make sure that i wasn't missing something basic. I'm sure i can work out a different way of handling things just the entered area would be worked well for what i wanted.

What's the range that you want to search, how many of these items would exist, and how instant does the reaction need to be? You can probably pull it off using ListMobilesNearLocation with about a second or two of sleep between checks.

It's an old design decision, I assume it would require some big code changes at the moment. Probably at the time the cost of updating the events each time an item was added/removed from the world was considered too high. Or just no one thought about it...

Given today's processor speeds I imagine the overhead of adding that event to items shouldn't be a problem. The Devs would know better about this but it seems to me that having a script scan for mobiles in a range would take about as much time.

We're talking about players entering the area here. Is there a way to specify some sort of flag to differentiate between mobile types, ie. NPCs and players? That might reduce overhead since the entered area event would be looking for only characters that are players. I've thought it odd that this was only limited to NPCs but I'm sure Nando is right that it was either a design oversight or the original though was to reduce overhead.

I would like a special POL object with a control script which acts like a NPC and supports EnteredArea-Events. It is not necessary that every item supports this.

I am using a NPC for exactly this function: I have a miracle-spell which does things to an area, for example it does not allow fighting. This is temporary and limited to a radius around the cast location. I am actually using an invisible NPC with a special NPC-script for this - it works like a charm, but is a bit complicated.

What I did: I created a NPC (human form), and set it invisible, the player will never see it. The NPC-script does not support moving or fighting, it is very simple and does only setup the Area-Events for itself. Then it stands around and applies the effect to every mobile entering its area, and removes it when it leaves the area. It also stores all modified mobiles, and when the effect ends, it removes it from all remaining mobiles and deletes itself.

This could be a solution to your problem, but not a very elegant one I admit...